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Fei-Fei Dong and Yungqing Zhou, this year’s Bachauer recitalists, met as teenagers at a Chinese piano competition, but didn’t get to really know each other until they arrived at Juilliard. On October 16, the two, who often lunch together and make expeditions to Flushing to eat Chinese hot pot, will be performing together again, when the 37th annual Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition winners recital takes place in Paul Hall.
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Dong, who was also a Bachauer recitalist last year, will perform Schumann’s Novelette, Op. 21, No. 8, and Volodos’s Concert Paraphrase on Mozart’s Turkish March. She’s from Shenzhen, near Hong Kong, and studies with piano department chair and alum Yoheved Kaplinsky. Zhou, who’s from Senyang, a northern China city known for the number of musicians it produces, will perform Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude and the Bizet-Horowitz Variations on a Theme from Carmen. He studied at Curtis, and now Juilliard, with alum Robert McDonald. For Dong, the concert comes in the midst of a very busy fall. She was a finalist in this year’s Van Cliburn International Piano Competition and as such is playing a number of concerts this year, sandwiching the Bachauer between performances of Chopin’s Second Concerto and the Grieg Concerto in New York and Ohio. “It will be a little tight!” she told The Journal.
The recital is also the season opener of the McGraw-Hill Financial Young Artists Showcase and as such will be broadcast on WQXR on October 23 at 9 p.m.
